This course will cover the process for a playwright to create a story for the purpose of having it presented on a stage by actors. Using her play Harlem Duet as an example, award-winning playwright Djanet Sears will share her writing process - from its initial idea as a prelude to Shakespeare’s Othello to a full length production. From the development of the initial idea, to the process of rehearsals and production, you will learn what is involved in writing a piece intended to be “presented” instead of simply read. Learn all of the elements involved in bringing a piece from the page to the stage.

Facilitator

Djanet Sears is a Toronto-based award-winning playwright, director and actor. She is the author of several plays, including Afrika Solo, The Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God and Harlem Duet, for which she received the Chalmers Award, the Governor General’s Literary Award and a Dora Mavor Moore Award. She has also received Black Theatre Workshop’s Martin Luther King Jr. Achievement Award, the Harry Jerome Award for Excellence and a Phenomenal Woman in the Arts Award. She is an adjunct professor at University College, University of Toronto, and the driving force behind the AfriCanadian Playwrights Festival, a celebration of African diasporic writing for the Canadian stage, held in Toronto in 2003 and 2006. She is the editor of a two-volume collection of African Canadian plays, Testifyin': Contemporary African Canadian Drama (2000), and Tellin' It Like It Is: A Compendium of African Canadian Monologues for Actors (2000).

Moderator

Rachael Van Fossen is an artist, educator, researcher and arts consultant in areas of community collaboration and socially-engaged performance. Van Fossen was founding artistic director of Common Weal Community Arts (1992-1999), artistic director of Black Theatre Workshop from 2001-2005, and co-founder and associate artistic director of the Collectif MOYO from 2007-2010. She has traveled across Canada and to England, Ireland, France, Greece and Australia to lead workshops and/or speak about her work. She is on faculty with the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts program at Goddard College, and teaches in the Theatre and Development BFA specialization at Concordia University.